


Praha

by Ruhenheim



Category: Monster (Anime & Manga)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:00:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25035085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruhenheim/pseuds/Ruhenheim
Summary: Nina returns to Prague.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Praha

She tries not to think of what was stolen from her. That kind of language is Johann’s domain - things they were robbed of, things they were owed. She is not the type of person to feel entitled to much of anything, not clarity nor peace nor even vengeance. She lives life, for the most part, to leave things better than she found them. If she is selfless, it is not out of altruism; it is because she has lost her sense of self so many times that, at some point, it became permanently misplaced.

Perhaps this is why she is back in Prague. Looking for the misplaced self. She traces the same path every day, from a run-down neighborhood west of Vltava where she is renting a flat from a middle-aged, chain-smoking redhead to the Three Frogs. She finds it curious that, in a city where even the buildings are known by their names, she is still without one. Nevertheless, she is content being Nina. It suits her. It is short, sweet, diminutive, of multiple origins. Once, at a cafe, she was startled by a song: Jo-ha-ni-no, tu-ha-ni-na. She wrote down the syllables on a napkin, her heart palpitating a bit. It almost disappointed her to find, as she squinted to read the translation off a lilac-colored webpage back at home, that the lyrics had nothing to do with ill-fated twins. She would have to take her search for meaning elsewhere.

On a steep, cobbled street leading toward the castle, she finds a school supplies store. The wares are no different from what she is used to back home - hexagonal jars of Stabilo pens and flat tins of Faber Castell wooden colors and the pleasant smell of cardstock and clean rubber erasers that always reminded her of the first day of school. She tests the zipper of a pencil case before walking to the paper goods section. With a twinge of survivor's guilt, she remembers how her parents had presented her with a parcel of Clairefontaine notebooks before she had started university, a small luxury that had filled her with appreciation and warmth. She walks past the bright colors and stops in front of a sketchpad. It's a bit Bonaparta-like of her. She is not sure if it is the right thing to do. The clerk smiles at her as he slides her purchase into a flat white paper bag.

She does not yet know what she wants to depict on that sketchpad.

In the evening, she sits on the kitchen chair with a cup of chamomile tea. In moments like these, when life slows down to a stream of ordinary moments, it is hard to believe that things ever happened outside the norm. She folds the top cover of the sketchpad back along the perforated edge and picks up the pencil. One frog. Two frogs. Three.

When they were younger, one of her friends, Klara, would sometimes read out loud from girls’ magazines when the group got together before the afternoon class. Klara would lie on her stomach with her feet swaying above crisscrossed ankles, tracing the words of a personality test on the glossy page in front of her. “Think of a white room,” she said. “What is inside of it? Is there any furniture? Where is the furniture located with respect to the walls, windows, doors, or other fixtures?” Nina's forehead would wrinkle in concentration. She developed a habit of coming up with two separate answers: a socially acceptable one befitting a regular girl, slightly naive and timid, and a real personality, stripped of patience and all saccharine emotions, who moved with the predetermined and singular purpose of a chess piece.

She goes to bed after a light dinner. A neighbor's dog, barking in the courtyard, keeps her awake. Her thoughts run in circles; they are like flies stunned by summer heat, stuck in an aimless pattern. There is something she is missing, something yet to be discovered, but she does not know what, and the only clue to its existence is a visceral discomfort with life, like a shoe that is slightly too big, or a friend who keeps asking you to dinner just to sit across from you in an awkward silence broken only by the scraping of her fork against her plate. Perhaps she needs a purpose. Somewhere to volunteer. Children to tutor. She could read to the elderly, or clean animal cages.

The sound of young people walking drunkenly down the street reaches her through the window. Their heels click against the asphalt with a strange clarity that she never hears at daytime, as if the night has its own kind of echo, reserved for amplifying whatever wants to stay quiet and hidden. She opens her eyes and checks her wristwatch. The fluorescent hands read half past eleven. On impulse, she kicks off the covers and sits up. She is on vacation; she can afford to go out at night, stay up late, introduce some chaos into her routine. She puts on a dress, a scarf, and a jean jacket. She paints her mouth with a lipstick several shades redder than she usually wears.

She feels like Goldilocks as she passes by the clubs in the university quart: too crowded; too quiet; just right. A finance student, straw-haired and reminiscent of one of her brother’s obsessive lackeys, approaches her. She rejects his advances with a frozen smile. Scanning the room, her eyes lock onto a young man's. He is tall and thin and baby-faced, but with no innocence at all in his expression. He picks up his glass of beer and walks over to join her.

They do not talk much. When his hand touches hers, she feels electrified. He pays their bill. She follows him outside demurely. She is not particularly experienced in these matters. When they stop at a red light, he takes her face in his hands and kisses her. She allows his hands to explore. It is not like her to be so bold; but she finds that being unlike herself is what she enjoys the most these days.

Statistically, it is unwise to go to a stranger’s house, but she knows how to take care of herself. His parents are asleep in the other room. He lays her down on his bed, atop an old, faded blanket that was once a dark, rich blue. On his shelf, she can see cyrillic on the spines of his books. From his features and complexion, she guesses he could be from one of the ex-Soviet countries in Central Asia, or maybe the Southeastern reaches of the Balkans. It makes no difference to her. She is lost in the feeling of being human, in the high of winning an unnecessary gamble. In the dim glow of his enamel-shaded desk lamp, she catches a sharpness to his features that gives him a delicate, almost regal look. In some other life, in a fairy tale, he could have been the child of a sultan’s daughter and her janissary guardsman. And in some other life, she could have been a regular girl, conceived not as an experiment but out of tame, ordinary love, a girl who can flip through an album of old photographs and see herself through different stages of life, from the baby bump stretching a smiling mother's floral dress onward, a girl who does not have to take a train to another country to feel whole or real.

She leaves in the morning. He has offered to make her breakfast, and she has politely declined. She respects his nonchalance. When he kisses her cheek in the doorway, she feels a surprising onslaught of emotions, conflicting but not unpleasant. She follows his directions towards Koněnova, then walks westward. The air is cool; the day feels fresh and new, like the beginning of the summer vacation, like the smell of a bakery at sunrise. She walks by a cafe being set up for the breakfast crowd; a stubbled young man in a black apron, carrying two chairs, mumbles a hello to her over his cigarette. She returns the greeting with a shy smile.

It is still early enough that the streets of the Old Town are empty. She remembers, with bittersweet fondness, walking around with Dieter and Tenma, trying to hold onto pieces of humanity and warmth in the midst of a warpath. There were moments that she would catch Tenma's eye and think that there was something there, not necessarily concealed but nevertheless unsaid, meant for her alone, and it tied her tongue and broke her brain. She had felt so strong then, full of purpose. There was no purpose anymore, not of that sort that consumed everything and made all else seem insignificant, as if real life was a paragraph in a tabloid, filler, small and irrelevant. She wanders aimlessly, weaving in and out of narrow streets, looping back, as if in her own personal labyrinth. When she makes it back to the flat, she goes straight to bed.

Her dreams are nonsense dreams, distorted replicas of the different stimuli encountered throughout the week: cans of paint, a girl on a bicycle, a large wooden window frame with four panes, like the ones children draw on houses. It is like watching a movie whose genre and plot change with every scene. She sees herself lying on the bed, and floating on top of her, pulled from the deepest recesses of her unaccounted thoughts, is Tenma, his face aligned with hers. He kisses her and it does not feel like a dream, but like flesh-and-blood lips pushing down on every nerve she has in her mouth. She drinks it in, the tongue and the spit and the sense of urgency and hunger that she knows she'd never draw out of him in real life. Her heart flutters. She wakes up and bites down on her tongue, caught between the desire to continue the dream and the fallow knowledge of the dream's futility. Something like that would never be in her cards.

She knows him to be cautious and scrupulous and to second-guess every decision. He does not move lightly. Everything is deliberate and premeditated. That kind of man does not lapse into momentary weakness, nor is he ever ruled by desire. They could be the last souls on earth and he would draw a respectful line in the sand. There is a strange sense of safety in loving someone like that - their rejection is impersonal. Deep down, though she would never admit it, she thinks he feels something, however vague and unspecified, that sets her apart in his mind. There are words she remembers, little moments she has latched on like when a foot gets caught on a rock, or fabric snags on a sharp object, interrupting the natural flow of things: an embrace, a look, a sigh, a painful clenching of the heart that she knows must be reciprocated. There were instances when, has she been bolder or more reckless, she could have leaned in more closely, held him more urgently, and plausibly inched her way from impropriety to inevitability, all under the weight of his hand on her face. But she had not, and those moments had come and gone, taking all possibility of fulfilment away, only to leave her with a gap, now seemingly unbridgeable, of nearly two decades between them.

She turns on the bedside lamp and waits for her eyes to adjust before going to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. The window is ajar, letting in cool air. She has slept for hours. The street is quiet; she cannot pinpoint when the birds and the insects have gone still, but she is keenly aware of the silence. It has a deafening quality that makes her feel alone in the world. She knows that all she would have to do to dispel the thought is turn the radio on, but she savors the solitude. Almost absentmindedly, she slides her hand across the countertop toward where she left the sketchpad. The edge of the paper cuts the underside of her wrist. She ignores the bite of the pain and rolls the pencil closer.

What comes to her is the white room from her friend's magazine quiz; it is bare save for a table in the middle, octagonal in shape, with a sphere - a magic ball? - in its center. Like the rest of the room, it is white, but it is white like an absence of color, like an unfinished drawing, a study of still life with no gradient, reflecting nothing, casting no shadow. She knows the walls are round, like a tower's, with tall windows that arch and taper to a point at the top, but the exact shape escapes her, and everything she puts to paper looks clumsy and heavy-handed.

"The meaning of the room," Klara had read ceremoniously, "is your childhood."

She folds the sheet behind the others, taking care not to rip it. Perhaps she is looking in the wrong places, inward instead of outward, to the past instead of what is to come. Once, she was able to perceive the future with a single-minded focus. Pass the examination. Defend the thesis. Graduate. Those days are long gone, replaced by a dull hum of repetition and routine. She relishes obstacles, however unpleasant. What she needs is proof of onward travel, so to speak. A milestone after the milestone, a goal beyond the goal.

She lies awake until the morning. When most of the sky has brightened, she showers and heads for the farmer's market. The scallions smell fresh and strong and she gets two bunches, impulsively deciding to make a Japanese-style soup. It takes her the better part of an hour to stretch the dough and cut it into noodles. She places one section into the broth and leans her chin on her closed fist, which leaves a small print of white flour on her face.

She makes enough for at least three meals, but she finishes the soup in one go. She does not recall the last time she felt such ravenous hunger. Her stomach bulges slightly underneath the dress and she wonders, with very little emotion involved, if she will ever be a mother. It is a modern world, she thinks. You no longer need a husband for these things. You can go to a bank and flip through a binder of biographies and select whatever you deem suitable. It is an odd way of conceiving, but no more so than how she herself came about. Quite similar, in fact.

She thinks of her mother sometimes. Johann had always focused on her pain; he had felt like a natural successor of her rage and despair, an instrument of her revenge. But Nina preferred to think of who she was before Bonaparta. What kind of a person was she? What kind of daughter? Did she go out with her girlfriends outfitted in flared linen skirts and espadrilles, turning the heads of young soldiers on cobbled streets? Did she spend her evenings at the library, sitting in the soft light until closing time? What was her favorite poem? She wonders how much of her mother is imprinted upon her - not the fears, not the calculations nor the strategies necessitated by survival, but the little idiosyncrasies of voice and movement, those same things she saw of herself mirrored in Johann.

Only later, lying awake tormented by the hum of a mosquito, does she admit to herself that she is looking for traces of her mother in this city. Praha. There is no universally agreed upon etymology, but it is thought to come from práh, the word for threshold. Liminal. Fitting.

In the morning, uncharacteristically chill and crisp with the breath of rain, she makes her way swiftly to the train station and looks at the large timetable. There is a train to Brno in an hour. She could go there, walk the halls of the university, continue chasing the long-gone trails of her mother's youth. She looks at the ticket booth uncertainly, then turns around.

She lets muscle memory take over as she leaves the station. A wind blows from the river, and the closer she gets to the bridge, the colder it whips past her ears. The sky, low and gray, closes in on the rooftops, which still look to her like they're illustrations from a storybook. She stops and leans on the balustrade and takes a deep breath. Something deep within her quakes, and she bites her lip and stares at the river until the moment passes.

Perhaps, she thinks, the answer is that there are no answers, that she simply must continue rolling forward like a wheel.

She passes by the Three Frogs. She takes in the sign and the facade but she doesn't linger. There is a side street, one she does not remember going down before. She takes a quick, shallow breath, and turns the corner.


End file.
